A QUESTION IN CRITICISM.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXII, Issue LXII, 31 January 1912, Page 4

A QUESTION IN CRITICISM.

Here and there throughout New • Zealand there are writers who, "just now, are saying curious things about Mr H. B. Irving, the actor. Most of those gentlemen agree in describing Mr Irvine as an actor of superlative talent nay, as a genius in his line, and they speak of his Hamlet as one of the great things m the history 'of the stage. A reference to old newspaper hies would, we believe, show that praise akin to this has been lavished on other actors, so that, it would seem, the colonies have been visited by a procession of geniuses of the highest order. Is this a fact, or is it obviously open to .question? In any. case, how does it come to pass, in so far as the writers are concerned? Is it because men are literally children of a larger growth—especially critics; and that every successively well-advertised person who comes along is to them, like every successive new toy to a child— the wonder of the world. Anyway, the ecstacy lavished on Mr Irving's predecessors surely somewhat discounts the value of the haloes hung around his own head. Indeed, some of the things specifically said of himself, on the one hand, suggest that there cannot be much justification for the praise unstintedly meted out to him with the other. Can it be true dramatic art, or good stagecraft, to represent a great character in a manner not in keeping with the text of the author himself? ihe Dominion's critic calls Mr Irving 'a spare, eager, alert, well-balanced Hamlet'; and if this is correct, can his Hamlet be Shakespeare's Hamlet at all? If his Hamlet is not Shakespeare's, surely it is very much amiss, and strangely uncritical to belaud Kis work m connection with Shakespeare's great, play, though that work be fairly noteworthy on other grounds A "spare eager, alert, well-balanced Hamlet!" At this rate, Mr Irvine must-surely play Shakespeare's "Han> let" with the part of Hamlet left out. Let those who are in doubt re-read the play for themselves, or consider what Goethe says in his luminous commentaries on the drama. "Hamlet," says Goethe, "finds fencing an irksome task; the perspiration runs off his face and the Queen remarks:

'He's fat, and scant of breath.' Can you imagine him here as being otherwise than fair and well-conditioned ? For dark-haired persons are rarely of this constitution in their youth. Then, again, are not his inactivity and melancholy, his soft sorrow, and his per-, petnal vacillation, better suited to such a figure than to that of a slim and dark-haired youth? From the latter one would exnect more resoluteness and activity." After this, to say that Mr Irving "is a spare, eager, alert, wellbalanced Hamlet," and to credit him with greatness as p." interpreter, of Shakespeare's great raation" is perplexing, to say the '-ast of it. It i s , at anyrate, plain enough- that Mr Irving's Hamlet is not Shakespeare's Hamlet—the embodiment of a great over-subtle intellect in a state of endless see-saw, and with a physical constitution which causes his own mother to describe him as "fat and scant of breath."